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. 2019 Sep;75(9):1626-1642.
doi: 10.1002/jclp.22781. Epub 2019 Apr 17.

Longitudinal relations between trauma-related psychological distress and physical aggression among urban early adolescents

Erin L Thompson  1 , Albert D Farrell  1
Affiliations

Longitudinal relations between trauma-related psychological distress and physical aggression among urban early adolescents

Erin L Thompson et al. J Clin Psychol. 2019 Sep.

Abstract

There is convincing evidence that trauma-related psychological distress and aggressive behavior are highly related among adolescents. The evidence is less clear regarding the direction of this relation.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine reciprocal longitudinal relations between trauma-related distress and physical aggression.

Method: A predominantly African American sample of early adolescents (N = 2,271; mean age = 12.9) living in an urban, under-resourced community participated in this investigation. The current study used autoregressive cross-lagged models to examine changes across four waves of data within each grade of middle school.

Results: Support was found for trauma-related distress uniquely predicting increased levels of physical aggression. This effect was consistent across gender and within and across middle school grades. Conversely, physical aggression did not predict changes in trauma-related distress.

Conclusions: Violence prevention efforts should routinely screen for trauma-related distress.

Keywords: early adolescence; gender differences; physical aggression; seasons; trauma-related psychological distress.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors do not have any conflict of interests to disclose.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Autoregressive path model (standardized coefficients) representing reciprocal relations between trauma-related psychological distress and physical aggression across a year within middle school. Demographic covariates and correlations between measures within each wave were included in the model, but are not shown in the figure.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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